Building Patient/Doctor Trust

The patient/doctor relationship is in trouble. What was once a close and trusting relationship is now becoming distant and suspicious. That is unfortunate and quite troubling. For doctors, a close, helpful and trusting relationship with their patients is one of the main reasons most choose to become doctors in the first place. In most cases, it is a doctor who first touches us when we are born and it is a doctor who is often the last to touch us before we die. Between these two bookends of life, we experience a multitude of encounters with the men and women of medicine whose responsibility is to help us regain and maintain our health and well-being. There are many reasons for this fractured relationship between doctor and patient: millions of Americans without health care insurance, overcrowded emergency rooms and doctor offices, too little time available to spend between doctor and patient, patient safety, a disparity of medical outcome for minorities, a malpractice environment which all lead to defensive medical practices, suspicious doctors and skeptical patients. At the root of these reasons lies an important common denominator, the lack of communication between patient and doctor. There was a time when doctors went to the home to dispense care. During those visits family members and their doctor got to know each other. They often shared a piece of cake or a cup of coffee during the visit, and over the years developed a trusting relationship. Unfortunately today, with so little time available for doctors to visit with patients, we lack the means to establish this critically important and necessary relationship. In my first book, Doctors Cry, Too: Essays from the Heart of a Physician, I shared much of my personal life, as well as profound medical experiences with many of my patients, in an effort to show the heart of a physician and how doctors care very much about their patients. In Building Patient / Doctor Trust I deal with